Groove harmony

See also a study of groove melody

Chords work differently in grooves than they do in songs and linear compositions. In his book Everyday Tonality, Philip Tagg proposes that chords in loops are mainly there to signpost locations in the meter. By his theory, the metrical location of a chord matters more than its harmonic function. This idea aligns with my experience of listening to and making groove-based music. I’d like to develop it further, to form a general theory of how groove harmony works.

I don’t plan to try to explain every kind of groove there is, but I do want to look for widely recurring patterns. My main goal is to save my students the many years of trial and error that it took me to figure out this vast and understudied area of musical practice.

Disclaimers: this isn’t any kind of complete theory, it’s me thinking out loud about a bunch of examples. I chose those examples because I like them and find them interesting, not because I’m trying to be systematic.

General concepts

The important thing to understand about groove-based music is that harmony is completely optional. Pitches are optional too, though they are almost always present regardless. If there is harmony in a groove, it can be as simple as a drone, or as complex as atonal and/or microtonal chaos. In American music, groove harmony usually falls into one of a few broad categories:

• Pentatonic. Major and minor pentatonic scales are ubiquitous in groove melodies. However, the underlying chords will often use additional notes from major or minor keys, modes, and so on.
• Diatonic. Western European “classical”-style major and minor keys. The chords don’t function in grooves the way they do in classical music. Cadences are scarce, because the feeling of finality breaks up the groove, so the major and minor scales behave more like modes.
• Modal. This category includes the diatonic modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Mixolydian), as well as modes of other scales, like Phrygian dominant and Mixolydian b6.
• Blues. A combination of ideas from diatonic and modal harmony, plus microtonal blue notes, organized according to its own conventions and characteristic gestures. Blues is co-emergent with the groove aesthetic of Black American music.
• Jazz. A superset of all of the above, plus some jazz-specific exotica: extended chords, chromaticism, symmetric scales, quartal harmony, and so on.

You can categorize loop structures according to their harmonic complexity. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to do this, though. Should you count the number of different chords, or how many transitions there are from one chord to another? Does shifting chord voicings within a single mode count as a chord change? I’ll try to answer these questions on a case-by-case basis as I go.

No-chord grooves

These are grooves that have no harmonic content at all. This category includes many classic rap songs. That doesn’t mean that rap is “unpitched” – rap is full of melody! The drums have pitches as well, though those are more approximate.

Audio Two – “Top Billin’” – two-bar drum loop

Run-DMC – “Sucker MCs” – four-bar drum loop

Slick Rick & Doug E Fresh – “La Di Da Di” – one-bar beatbox loop

Jeru the Damaja – “Come Clean” – four-bar drum and percussion loop

Lil’ Mama – “Lip Gloss” – one-bar stomp and clap loop

In current rap, the kick drum is usually a sampled or synthesized 808 kick, which is a sine wave with a clear pitch to it. So even if drums are the only instrumental sounds present, the kicks give the songs at least some implied harmony.

One-chord grooves

One-chord grooves include modal grooves with pedals in the bass, one-chord blues, and a more general category that Tagg refers to as “one-chord changes.”

Drones and pedals:

Busta Rhymes – “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” (verses) – A-flat pedal in a one-bar bass loop over a two-bar drum loop

Kendrick Lamar – “Backseat Freestyle” – A percussion sound plays a repeated D-flat over a four-bar drum loop; the intermittent vocal samples are pitched, but not clearly enough to establish harmony

Blues:

John Lee Hooker – “Boogie Chillen” – B blues, one-bar riff with unpredictable variations and solo passages

Howlin’ Wolf – “Spoonful” – E blues, two-bar phrases with call-and-response structure

Aretha Franklin – “Chain of Fools” – C blues/Dorian, two-bar phrases – guitar plays C7 but all the melodies are minor pentatonic with lots of blue thirds and fifths

The Temptations – “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” – B-flat blues/Dorian, four-bar phrases

Modal:

Miles Davis – “Shhh/Peaceful” – D Mixolydian, phrase structure is amorphous

Parliament – “Mothership Connection” (A section) – D-sharp Phrygian, four-bar vocal melody over a two-bar riff

Talking Heads – “Once in a Lifetime” – D Mixolydian, two-bar riff (becomes a four-bar three-chord groove in its ending section)

Eddy Grant – “Electric Avenue” – A Mixolydian, four-bar groove (but do we count the occasional D/A chords as chord changes or decorative suspensions?)

Pete Rock and CL Smooth – “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” – C Dorian, two-bar loop

KRS-One – “Step Into a World (Rapture’s Delight)” – B-flat Phrygian, two-bar loop

Björk – “Possibly Maybe” (A section) – B Lydian, one-bar loop with a long and unpredictable vocal melody on top

Björk – “Possibly Maybe” (B section) – C-sharp melodic minor, one-bar loop with a long and unpredictable vocal melody on top

Missy Elliott – “Get Ur Freak On” – F Phrygian, eight-bar loop with a subtle variation in the seventh bar

Two-chord grooves

This is a very prevalent loop model. Tagg calls it a “chord shuttle.” The shuttle is typically highlighting two different positions in a mode, though not always.

Herbie Hancock – “Chameleon” – B-flat Dorian/blues

Pink Floyd – “The Great Gig in the Sky” (the soulful singing part) – G Dorian

||: Gm7 | C7 :||

Parliament – “Flash Light” – C Dorian/blues

Parliament – “Mothership Connection” (B section) – F-sharp natural minor

Digable Planets – “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” – F-sharp minor? Phrygian? The horn sample implies F#m11 and Em11, and the bassline is ambiguous

Deee-Lite – “Groove is in the Heart” – A-flat Mixolydian/Dorian/blues

Mary J Blige – “Family Affair” – C-sharp Dorian

Stevie Wonder – “I Wish” – various E-flat Dorian grooves with this form:

||: Ebm7  Ab7 :||

Harmonic rhythm matters. The two chords don’t have to be exactly evenly distributed across the loop. In “I Wish,” the Ab7 isn’t on beat three, it’s anticipated by a sixteenth note.

Three-chord grooves

With three chords spread across two or four bars, these grooves are necessarily lopsided in their harmonic rhythm.

Lynyrd Skynyrd – “Sweet Home Alabama” – D Mixolydian

||: D7  C  |  G  :||

Bob Marley – “Stir It Up” – A major (I’m not counting the brief Asus4 as a “real” chord change)

Busta Rhymes – “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” (chorus) – A-flat minor, though the Bb/Ab comes from parallel A-flat Lydian

Lupe Fiasco – “Kick Push” – A minor (first half feels like A natural minor, second half feels like A Dorian)

||: Em7 | G7 | Am6 | Am6 :||

Miley Cyrus – “Party in the USA” – F-sharp major

||: F# | C#/E# | D#m | D#m :||

Four-chord grooves

The infamous Axis progression is a four-chord loop, and it’s the dominant harmonic model for current pop. 12Tone has a detailed theory of four-chord loops–the video cites this very blog.

12tone says that to understand four-chord loops, you need to look at the transitions between the chords, not the chords themselves. They have a whole classification scheme based on the various possible transitions you can make. It all sounds perfectly plausible to me.

U2 – “With or Without You” – D major, the classic I-V-vi-IV “axis” progression

||: D | A | Bm | G :||

TLC – “Waterfalls” – E-flat major/Mixolydian (with lots of blues inflection)

||: Eb | Bb | Db | Ab :||

Carly Rae Jepsen – “Call Me Maybe” – G major (at least, that’s what the melody implies; the chords are ambiguous between D Mixolydian and maybe C Lydian)

||: C | D | Em | D :||

Daft Punk – “Get Lucky” – B Dorian

||: Bm | D | F#m | E :||

Odd grooves

There are two ways to do an odd-sounding groove: have it be an odd length, or have it be an even length but with the chords distributed unevenly. I suppose you could also do both.

Odd length:

The Roots – “Don’t See Us” – B-flat… minor? I don’t know how to describe the key

The Roots – “The Lesson Part III (It’s Over Now)” – B-flat… something, I don’t know how to describe either the key or the changes, but the loop is six bars long

Miles Davis – “It’s About That Time” (groove two) – F Dorian/blues

Deltron 3030 – “3030” – three bar loop that repeats two and a half times

Odd distribution of chords in an even-length loop:

Kendrick Lamar – “Alright” – D Dorian, four-bar loop

||: Ebm7 | Dm7 | Dm7 | Dm7 :||

Kendrick Lamar – “Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst” – B major/Mixolydian, four-bar loop

Ambiguities

Is “Thelonius” by Slum Village a one-chord groove or a two-chord groove? There are two distinct chords in the piano, Cm and Bbm. The bassline is a riff in Bbm. So are those piano chords just different voicings of Bbm11, or are they really two distinct chords?

Is the ending/chorus part of the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” a three-chord loop or a four-chord loop? I’d call it a three-chord loop where the two bars of F happens to straddle the loop start, but I could also believe that the loop start point “resets” everything.

Is “Versace” by Migos a two-chord loop or a four-chord loop?

||: Am Bb | Bb Am :||

Once again, I’d call it a two-chord loop where the two chords are arrayed across the bar lines, but I would also believe it as a four-chord loop. I guess it depends whether we’re counting total different chords, or whether we’re feeling the barlines as “resetting” each of the chords?

Is “Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place)” by Talking Heads a one-chord groove, a two-chord groove, or a four-chord groove? The bassline implies D, Em, C, Em, the guitar plays G, A and B, and the other parts float up and down the G major scale in various ways. I hear it as modal G major, but would also believe it as having a chord progression with a lot of extensions and suspensions.

Hypermeter

Loops usually occur in groupings that follow powers of two: two, four, eight, sixteen. It’s also fairly common for them to occur in groupings that multiply powers of two by three: six, twelve, twenty-four. Even when a groove is very abstract and complex, like Herbie Hancock’s “Spank-a-Lee“, large-scale groupings are usually in orderly powers-of-two and factors-of-three groupings. People don’t usually count measures while they’re dancing, but a thirty-two-bar grouping feels “right” in a way that a thirty-one or thirty-three-bar doesn’t, even to a non-expert listener. Sometimes grooves do use odd phrases and repetitions, but usually for effect, to intentionally disrupt the hypermeter, as in the end of the break in “Chain of Fools.”

Longer-form grooves

The twelve-bar blues is a longer and more complex groove form with widely varying chords and harmonic rhythm. Here’s one standard version:

The image at the top of this post shows a MIDI visualization of a twelve-bar blues tune, “Straight No Chaser” by Thelonious Monk.

Jazz uses even longer loop forms, like rhythm changes and other thirty-two-bar forms. But rhythm changes is itself a collection of loops: the A sections are all the same loop with slightly varying endings, and the B section could work as a loop unto itself too.

Loops of loops

It’s possible to build larger song structures by stringing loops together. “Keep On Truckin’” by Eddie Kendricks uses a series of loops of various length in F minor, F blues, and A-flat major. Songs in most American vernacular styles consist of loops spliced together. You might hear more European-style through-composition in musical theater, prog rock and artsier forms of metal. However, in rock, pop, R&B and so on, sections are usually loops, and there may be larger loops of loops as well.

Like I said, this post is mostly just me thinking out loud, trying to make sense out a bunch of loops and grooves I’ve been transcribing over the past couple of decades. But I do sense the outlines of a bigger theory here. I’ll keep you posted.